The Ones Who Never Tried Their Best
Their palms clutch borrowed light.
Flickers masquerading as flame.
Meanwhile, the earth insists:
wheat fields gild the horizon’s edge,
waves crack their knuckles against the shore,
tides drag whole worlds in their wake.
They feel it in their bones, this hunger
to burn, not borrow. Yet they orbit,
moths circling a bulb’s false sun.
Click. Hover. Save for later.
But the guitar string thrums in its case.
The dancer’s shadow twitches on the wall.
Fingers itch to dig soil, to split salt spray,
to write a name in the wet cement.
Passions don’t rot, they fester sharp and sour,
while feeds scroll on, endless as a requiem.
Dusk isn’t an opportunity to post. It’s a dare—
the sky tears itself open, crimson and aching,
wind hustling through the eaves, shouting:
Live. Live. Live.
But they’ve muted the volume,
swapped thunder’s drumroll
for the quiet murmur
of audio soon forgotten.
Midnight. Screens glow like dying embers.
They glimpse the others: the potter’s mud-caked laugh,
the diver suspended in neon brine,
the writer who bled a novel onto napkins.
Each image, a gut-punch. Each swipe, a surrender.
Here is what the ones who
never tried their best failed to realize:
Time isn’t a pantry. It’s a lit fuse.
The maple tree sheds its coins today.
Rain writes its manifesto today.
The child’s laugh is a comet; here, then gone.
And the deer? It leaps. Not from fear, but fury.
Its muscles coiled, a live wire hurling itself
into the dark’s wet mouth. No hesitation.
No app to map the forest. Just the wild,
beautiful risk of motion.
When the power dies, let it stay dead.
Let the dark be a struck match.
Just your pulse, loud as a war drum,
your hands, empty of everything but potential.
A deer frozen by starlight, not headlights.
The ones who never tried their best
will forever wonder if the weight of regret
is heavier now, or if they should have carried the
weight of a changed world when they, too, were younger.
In the hollowed-out silence,
they grope for a self unplugged and
find only the raw thrum of a pulse.
But it's exactly this pulse which exists
within them and not the billions of lives unlived.
Probability condenses with each breath of new air.
Today, I exist, they may say, begets the forgotten phrase:
And tomorrow, I may not.
What is a life but the sum of all the light we refused to cradle?